Benjamin F. Cheatham

Benjamin Franklin Cheatham (20 October 1820-4 September 1886) was a Major-General of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War.

Biography
Benjamin Franklin Cheatham was born in the Westover plantation of Nashville, Tennessee, United States on 20 October 1820, maternally descended from Tennessee's founder James Robertson. He served as a captain in a Tennessee infantry regiment of the US Army during the Mexican-American War, and he was a gold miner in California from 1849 to 1853. On 9 May 1861, he became a Brigadier-General in the Confederate States Army at the start of the American Civil War, and he was promoted to Major-General in March 1862. Cheatham served in the Western Theater of the war, and he was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. At the Battle of Stones River, the drunken Cheatham failed to attack Union positions successfully, and he received notoriety in 1864 when the Union general John Schofield slipped past John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee and managed to engage Hood at the Battle of Franklin and the Battle of Nashville in late autumn and winter. He served as a division commander during the North Carolina before surrendering in April 1865. In 1872, his rrun for the US House of Representatives failed, and he was postmaster of Nashville from 1885 until his 1886 death at the age of 65.